Discussion Topic

CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin made an interesting comment yesterday that I think is spot on. His comment was essentially that the Snowden affair is no longer a legal issue, but rather one of politics and foreign policy.

Curt

something we agree on. until they catch him it will be a huge political issue that the US is losing.

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia confirmed directly for the first time on Tuesday that Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former American national security contractor, was staying temporarily in an international transit area at a Moscow airport, and Mr. Putin appeared to rule out American requests for his extradition to the United States.

Speaking at a news conference while on an official visit to Finland, Mr. Putin offered no new information on where Mr. Snowden might be headed from the transit area of Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, where he has been ensconced, out of public view, for the past two days. But he said Mr. Snowden had broken no Russian laws.

“Mr. Snowden is a free man,” Mr. Putin said, “and the sooner he chooses his final destination, the better it will be both for us and for him.”

Mr. Putin also said Mr. Snowden's arrival "was a complete surprise for us" and that as a transit passenger, “he doesn’t need a visa or other documents. As a transit passenger, he has a right to buy a ticket and fly wherever he wants.”

He sought to refute suggestions that Russian security officials might be talking to Mr. Snowden, who is believed to be carrying a trove of American intelligence data on laptop computers and thumb drives. Mr. Putin said they “have never worked with Mr. Snowden and are not working with him now.”

The remarks by Mr. Putin were the most definitive and extensive from the Russian government on Mr. Snowden, whose successful effort, so far, to elude his American pursuers has captivated global attention, showed the limits of American power and strained American relations with both Russia and China. Mr. Snowden flew to Moscow on Sunday from Hong Kong despite an American request that the authorities there arrest him.

Mr. Putin said American accusations that Russia was abetting a fugitive “are just a nightmare and nonsense,” and he appeared to end any possibility that Russia would extradite Mr. Snowden.

“We can extradite foreign nationals only to those countries with which we have relevant international agreements on the extradition of criminals,” Mr. Putin said. “We have no such agreement with the United States.”

While in Russian territory, Mr. Putin said, “Mr. Snowden, thank God, has not committed any crimes.”

Mr. Putin spoke hours after the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, chastised the United States for its demands regarding Mr. Snowden, who has been charged with violating American espionage laws by revealing secret information on intelligence-gathering. He and his allies describe him as a whistle-blower whose revelations have exposed what they called the United States government’s invasion of privacy around the world.

Mr. Lavrov said Mr. Snowden had not crossed the Russian border, which appeared at first to be a denial that he was in Russia. But it also was a technical way of saying Mr. Snowden was in the international passenger transit area, a restricted zone where foreign travelers do not get their passports stamped and do not pass through immigration checkpoints as they await flight connections to other countries.

American officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, lashed out with unusual force on Monday against China for allowing Mr. Snowden to leave Hong Kong, against Russia for permitting him safe transit and against Ecuador for declaring that it is actively considering Mr. Snowden’s request for political asylum. The Americans have demanded that he be seized and repatriated.

“He didn’t cross the Russian border, and we consider the attempts we are seeing to accuse the Russian side of violating United States law as completely ungrounded and unacceptable, or nearly a conspiracy accompanied by threats against us,” Mr. Lavrov said, speaking to reporters here after a meeting with the Algerian foreign minister. He added, “There are no legal grounds for this kind of behavior from American officials toward us.”

Later in the day Mr. Kerry, speaking to reporters while visiting Saudi Arabia, sought to tone down the angry exchange of words with his Russian counterpart, with whom he has sought to cultivate a good relationship. “We are not looking for a confrontation,” Mr. Kerry said.

The comments by Mr. Putin and Mr. Lavrov were the first by top Russian officials about Mr. Snowden since Mr. Snowden’s reported arrival at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow on Sunday. Employees of Aeroflot, the Russian airline, said Mr. Snowden had been booked on an afternoon flight Monday to Havana, but he did not board and the aircraft left without him.

Ecuador confirmed that it had received an asylum request and had provided documents allowing Mr. Snowden to travel there. Mr. Snowden’s American passport has been revoked.

Russian officials on Monday said that they had no information about Mr. Snowden, which seemed unlikely at the time given that the Russian police took the unusual step of standing on the tarmac surrounding the plane that reportedly was supposed to take him to Cuba. Russian authorities also cordoned off the gate and had threatened to take telephones from journalists preparing to board the flight.

The sharp tone of comments by Mr. Kerry and other American officials was surprising, in part because there was no reason to believe that they could force Russia to cooperate and because it is highly unlikely that, if the roles were reversed, the United States would readily repatriate a Russian fugitive security official reportedly carrying computers filled with government secrets.

The United States and Russia, fierce rivals on intelligence matters dating to the cold war, have long shown an ability to maintain their broader bilateral relationship in the face of occasional disputes over espionage incidents, including the arrest last month in Moscow of an American Embassy employee accused of working as an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. But Mr. Lavrov’s pointed remarks indicated that the diplomatic contretemps was taking a nasty turn.

On Monday, the United States accused Russia of ignoring the law in allowing Mr. Snowden to travel through the Moscow airport and sharply criticized Russia, China and Ecuador over their records on Internet freedom.

Mr. Lavrov said on Tuesday, “We have no connection with Mr. Snowden, nor with his relation toward the American justice system, nor with his movement around the world. He chose his own route and we, like most of those here, found out about this from the press.”

The anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, which says it has helped Mr. Snowden evade the American authorities, has said that he is safe and healthy but has declined to pinpoint his whereabouts. The White House has said it believes that Mr. Snowden is still in Moscow.

American officials also openly mocked China and Russia on Monday as states that repress free speech and transparency and therefore are hardly apt refuges for someone fighting government secrecy in the United States.

“I wonder if Mr. Snowden chose China and Russia as assistants in his flight from justice because they’re such powerful bastions of Internet freedom,” Mr. Kerry said sarcastically during a stop in New Delhi.

President Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, said Mr. Snowden’s chosen destinations indicated “his true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the United States.”

The strong words went beyond typical diplomatic language and underscored the growing ramifications of the case for the United States. The Obama administration’s inability, at least for now, to influence China, Russia and countries in Latin America that may accept Mr. Snowden for asylum, like Ecuador, brought home the limits of American power around the world.

Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, criticized the United States on Monday for its pursuit of Mr. Snowden. “The one who is denounced pursues the denouncer,” Mr. Patiño said at a news conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, a stop on a previously scheduled diplomatic visit to Asia. “The man who tries to provide light and transparency to issues that affect everyone is pursued by those who should be giving explanations about the denunciations that have been presented.”

Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, wrote on his Twitter account, “We will analyze very responsibly the Snowden case and with absolute sovereignty will make the decision we consider the most appropriate.” The United States remains Ecuador’s leading trading partner, but Washington’s influence in Quito has been slight since Mr. Correa became president in 2007. He has repeatedly flouted and tweaked the United States, by, for example, stopping American antidrug flights out of a military base in Manta, and expelling the American ambassador in 2011 after WikiLeaks cables suggested she felt Mr. Correa had tolerated police corruption.

A range of American officials, including the deputy secretary of state and the F.B.I. director, spent Monday reaching out to their Russian counterparts seeking cooperation, without any apparent result. Mr. Snowden, who spent Sunday night in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport, did not board the flight for Havana and he made no public appearance or statement.

American intelligence officials remained deeply concerned that Mr. Snowden could make public more documents disclosing details of the National Security Agency’s collection system or that his documents could be obtained by foreign intelligence services, with or without his cooperation.

Technical experts have been carrying out a forensic analysis of the trail he left in N.S.A. computer systems, trying to determine what he had access to as a systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, a United States government contractor, and what he may have downloaded, officials said.

The South China Morning Post reported Monday night on its Web site that in an interview, Mr. Snowden said he had specifically sought the job at Booz Allen so he could collect information about the N.S.A.'s secret surveillance programs to release to news outlets.

Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for The Guardian, has said Mr. Snowden gave him thousands of documents, only a tiny fraction of which were published. Many may be of limited public interest, but they could be of great value to a foreign intelligence service, which could get a more complete idea of the security agency’s technical abilities and how to evade its net, officials said.

David M. Herszenhorn reported from Moscow, Peter Baker from Washington and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; Scott Shane, Steven Lee Myers and Charlie Savage from Washington; Michael R. Gordon from Jidda, Saudi Arabia; William Neuman from Quito, Ecuador; and Victoria Burnett from Havana.

Self-Pacification of the American CitizenryEdward J. Snowden and the Exposure of Voyeuristic Fascism
by NORMAN POLLACK

in the last two weeks—a sliver of time as wars and the violation of civil liberties go—America has suddenly lost face, stature, and the moral high ground it has always claimed, and stands exposed, more than in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, to the world’s and its own people’s understanding as the invader of human dignity and privacy, priceless attributes distinguishing democracy from totalitarianism.

Snowden enters the picture, surprisingly aware of all that is at stake, as witness his eloquent statements about how the denial of civil liberties negates and repudiates a democratic society, and from there, recognizes the magnitude of crime associated with surveillance. An individual, alone, powerless at the outset, has spoken out, and doing so, has shaken the foundations of power. This, more than a high point in the record of whistle-blowers, though intimately related to it, marks an epochal moment in the history of American freedom—or the search for it! It mustn’t be allowed to slip by as a result of the chorus of denunciation, from POTUS on down through all the usual suspects, Democrats and Republicans alike. Snowden has raised privacy into the pantheon of constitutional rights it deserves to be, as the index of societal health and individual personhood—something all the nefarious interventions, drone strikes, CIA-JSOC missions of subversion, indefinite detentions, have sought to obliterate from the popular consciousness, and until now, partially succeeded in doing.

SURVEILLANCE is not accidental strategy, but rather the cutting edge of individuals’ self-pacification, a well-tested mechanism of social control. One hesitates to speak, then even to think; one chooses one’s associates warily, lest found on someone’s list, the all-pervasive fear of being watched, dissected, analyzed by the prying eyes of the State, now a government-empowered and –legitimated National Security Agency (and multiple other intelligence agencies, along with such legislative onslaughts as TALON, CIFA, TIAP, and don’t forget MATRIX, Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, some of which going even too far for Congress’s reactionary taste), fully capable of spying on and retrieving the most intimate conversations between people hitherto unsuspecting of eavesdropping. Hopefully, suspiciousness of government will ensue, even though practices of this nature continue, because, as political theory teaches us, democratic society and government are founded on trust, without which, there can be no social compact

Snowden put his finger in the dike holding back the sea of totalitarianism, itself not an inaccurate designation any longer, i.e., if one believes that civil liberties is the linchpin of its polar opposite, a social democracy based on the respect for and equal treatment of the individual under the rule of law, because what the US government has done is destroy the American constitutional-social fabric, in the process making a mockery of the law through trampling on traditional safeguards to freedom of thought and rights of association, protection from unwarranted searches and seizures, and down a slippery slope to everything from use of informers, planted evidence, “dirty tricks,” to encouragement of mutual suspicion, the breakup of radical organizations, whatever government deems central to its interests, safety, and continued lawlessness.

Ho ho! Breaking the cycle of violence? That's going to happen very soon.
Just be patient.

Amidst the never ending wars (from the beginning of the Republic up to the
Principate, the doors of the temple of Janus were closed only twice - when
they were open it meant that Rome was at war), Rome had to face a severe
major social crisis, the Conflict of the Orders, a political struggle
between the Plebeians (commoners) and Patricians (aristocrats)..

Snowden turned the spotlight on the forbidden territory of the dark world inhabited by the Obama administration, a reaching out of tentacles not only in America but on a world basis, as his revelations of PRIMUS and foreign communications intercepts, including wiretaps of diplomats and conferences shows. The details are familiar by now, from the Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, to the Continental press and worldwide—a story that will not go away, given the enormity of the offense and the hypocrisy of Washington. For this reason, I believe Snowden is a marked man in Obama’s eyes, to him to be practically equated with Osama bin Laden, and therefore, being in Obama’s cross-hairs, if not through rendition (“accidents will happen”) then a direct target of paramilitary operations, Snowden is right to fear for his life and to seek asylum.

Snowden cannot be allowed to go free, not because he divulged State Secrets, but because he symbolizes the power—may I say, sublimeness?—of truth, particularly against what he exposed as a pack of political criminals, and beyond that, exposed, through their workings, the inner springs of repression on which American society and its structure of power depend, namely, self-pacification as an overriding state of moral-political inaction of body and mind, a rejection of social protest in thought and deed, the individual subject to cues provided by acute patriotism, consumerism, and the heavy-handed militarization of Authority. That, we could see, and for some, speak out against.

But this added factor, brought out by Snowden, of surveillance, gives self-pacification silent and powerful reinforcement: the fear of terrorism, itself contrived by government to justify security arrangements bordering on informal regimentation, has become transformed/extended into what psychologists would term—if only they examined consequential societal issues—the “introjection” of the entire power system in America, including its capitalist and military foundations, and the people’s own expected docility to its furtherance, goals, and ideology.

That is a big burden to carry around, even if unnoticed (the test of repression’s value and success to an authoritarian government), which leaves the individual naked and vulnerable to the extreme politicization of mindset designed to eschew critical thinking, and rather, glorify the State.

"Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for The Guardian, has said Mr. Snowden gave him thousands of documents, only a tiny fraction of which were published. Many may be of limited public interest, but they could be of great value to a foreign intelligence service, which could get a more complete idea of the security agency’s technical abilities and how to evade its net, officials said."

Uninformed supposition.

SIGINT (COMINT, ELINT, etcINT) has been going on since at least ancient Greece. The Russians and Chinese are under no illusions or doubts about the NSA, CIA, and DIA's capabilities, scope or coverage. And the likelihood they have any questions about "how to evade its net" is also about nil. Ok, sure, there are some governments like the Seychelles, Mauritania, and Cook Islands who might learn something they didn't know, but it's more a basic 'get a grip' sort of deal.

I mean, hey, governments and the intelligence community no longer have a lock on any of this stuff. It's all out there, available and even the computing and network hardware is all subject to all manner of creative attacks, hacking, and modding. None of it is a "secret" anymore. If anything, governments and their agencies are way behind the curve right now - even the NSA. This stuff is going on 24x7x365 all around the world by everyone from bored middle-schoolers to the NSA and KGB.

Domestic spying of the breadth and scope practiced by the NSA (which along with the CIA has become Obama’s Janus-faced look toward both internal and external acts of structural-political subversion) becomes the handmaid of counterterrorism, the latter, now self-legitimated through government edict thus spreading a cloak of legitimacy as well around the former. Surveillance is good! We hear ad nauseum that there must be a balance struck between security and privacy, with the former invariably taking precedence—a convenient debater’s trick because the former can be infinitely enlarged, and the latter, a straw man, toothless to boot. America’s fear of terrorism, itself a form of terrorism practiced on the people, paves the way for domestic spying on the part of Authority with impunity.

Militarism and surveillance are kissing cousins, each depends on the acceptance of prescribed ORDER. That order, a supreme ideological value of an hierarchical class structure such as we have now more than ever, with wide disparities of wealth and power, has in different, though largely nonpolitical, ways been challenged for some time, yet still awaiting focus—which Brazilian ferment, still a straw in the wind, may (along with Greece and Turkey) inspire. In any event, conformity is wearing thin, given multiple sources of discontent in American culture and society, building from civil rights, protest over Vietnam, and the rebelliousness of the counterculture, to what could be but has not yet been fashioned into a recognizable adversarial force for structural-economic-social change through the brute facts and experience of unemployment, mortgage foreclosure, rape of the environment, and the endless march to war, intervention, military stockpiling, and the abridgement of working-class rights and civil liberties. There is a crack in the façade of order, as understood by ruling groups, which, despite earlier abilities to control (and even sublimate into the time-honored paths of consumerism), can no longer be tolerated, particularly because they themselves perceive America’s changing position, its relative decline, in a now-multipolar world system beyond their powers of unilateral hegemony—therefore making the demand for conformity all the more urgent and satisfying.

Snowden blows to smithereens the pious claims of American Exceptionalism, a city on the hill made up of political demagogues, snoopers, voyeurs, mercenaries, and the scavengers in our midst, supercomputers to the ready, armed with preconceived notions of enemies lurking in the dark, a wholesale assemblage of vile operatives who are cloaked in the Flag, seemingly unassailable—until one person came along to reveal the public garbage masking itself as national security. This writer wishes him God’s speed to safety, long life, good health. The nation, whether it knows it or not, is indebted to Snowden’s bravery and moral conscience.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch/AK Press in the fall of 2013.